Zarafa's Bee-Hive Mind

Monday, 14 November 2011

Ultra-filtering Removes Pollen, Hides Honey Origins

More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery
stores isn't exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done
exclusively for Food Safety News.

The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled "honey."

The
removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would
make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world's
food safety agencies.

The food safety divisions
of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens
of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to
determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.

Thursday, 10 November 2011

BUG GUIDE
with a clickable guide
More than just a clearinghouse for information, this site helps expand
on the natural histories of our subjects. By capturing the place and
time that submitted images were taken, we are creating a virtual
collection that helps define where and when things might be found.
check it out!

Along with several other Google products, Blogger’s taken on a whole new look: A clean, sleek interface designed for a streamlined blogging experience. Not only does the new interface load faster, but we’ve also added shortcuts to your most important blogging actions. Check out our quick list of what’s changed below. "Google."

It seems to me that Google is trying to corral the blog community into the new interface
as it has become very difficult to post and to see the pages on the back -end to edit --- so I plan to move
not to change this blogs layout --- I have been blogging on this site since about 2008 and
the same for my "Green!" site --- which I did try the new interface and lost a lot of wonderful
information, videos etc, --- although the new interface offers a few different layouts -- it takes a new
approach and figuring out --- but I am willing to have a go!

Google has made some kind of error with their new interface which makes it impossible for me to add article -- Thanks for coming to Zarafa's Bee-Hive Mind -- I hope to resolve this and start posting again

FDA has the laws needed to keep adulterated honey off store shelves but does little, honey industry says.

A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have
been smuggled in from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics
and heavy metals. A Food Safety News investigation has
documented that millions of pounds of honey banned as unsafe in dozens
of countries are being imported and sold here in record quantities.

And
the flow of Chinese honey continues despite assurances from the Food
and Drug Administration and other federal officials that the hundreds of
millions of pounds reaching store shelves were authentic and safe
following the widespread arrests and convictions of major smugglers over
the last two years. Read article at Food Safety News.

Honeybees are perhaps one of the least recognized workers in the
agricultural industry. They contribute $15 billion in annual agriculture
revenue to the U.S. economy alone, as a full one-third of the U.S. food
supply depends on them pollinating crops.
Apple orchards, for instance, require one colony of bees per acre in
order to be adequately pollinated. So, unless the mysterious
disappearance of bees is reversed, major food shortages could result.
This is not a brand new issue.
For several years now, scientists have been struggling to determine
why bee colonies across the world are disappearing—a phenomenon dubbed
colony collapse disorder (CCD). In a series of reports and videos, PBS talks about the bee colony devastation and its impact on the food supply and U.S. agriculture.
For a great review, please watch the PBS episode, Silence of the Bees.

Silence of the BeesVideo: Full Episode

In the winter of 2006, a strange phenomenon fell upon honeybee hives
across the country. Without a trace, millions of bees vanished from
their hives, leaving billions of dollars of crops at risk and
potentially threatening our food supply. The epidemic set researchers
scrambling to discover why honeybees were dying in record numbers — and
to stop the epidemic in its tracks before it spread further. You can watch then purchase the DVD from PBS at their site.

Tuesday, 14 June 2011

One of the first articles I posted on this blog Zarafa's Bee-Hive Mind, was in April of 2007, about the ability of bees to recognize human faces. A World Science news item dated December 9, 2005 reports Adrian Dyer's study published in Journal of Experimental Biology, Honey Bees Can Recognize Human Faces!

"Scientists used to believe that facial recognition required a large brain. Adrian G. Dyer of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, a leading scientist in the field feels that this may not be the case. He found in his study on honey bees that even with a smaller brain than that of the humans, they could recognize human faces. According to Dyer the finding is the first time an invertebrate has shown ability to recognize faces of other species."
Bees are the most amazing little creatures, busy buzzing around, taking bundles of pollen on their little furry legs, around their knees, from that the expression "Like the bees knees" came I suppose! So they go from flower to flower and without them the plants would not be pollinated and bare fruit ---

Our fruit and vegetables are highly contaminated with pesticides, the EWG at this link you can get a down loadable list of highly toxic foods. The most toxic. Although it is best to eat organic produce whenever you can it is not always possible and there was an article in WSJ telling that --

The apple industry faces a potential public-relations headache in the wake of federal testing that found pesticide residues in 98% of America's second-most-popular fresh fruit, the highest rate among the produce screened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a yearly survey.

The last part of the article says the following about our little friends. "The World Science report adds: "The bees probably don’t understand what a human face is, Dyer said in an email. “To the bees the faces were spatial patterns (or strange looking flowers). Bees are famous for their pattern-recognition abilities, which scientists believe evolved in order to discriminate among flowers. As social insects, they can also tell apart their hive mates. But the new study shows that they can recognize human faces better than some humans can—with one-ten thousandth of the brain cells."

Bravo little friends without you we are lost.

I appreciate the comments of thanks and gratitude from readers who come by this and any other zarafa sister sites of which, I must admit there are many, and who appreciate the collection of articles stored in one place --- I do them as a repository, a place to keep important information, rather than putting it in my bookmark file.The bee issue is really dire and must be addressed in a profoundly pragmatic way.
I will always be eternally grateful to Google for giving us this fabulous tool.

Saturday, 5 February 2011

"Fishermen elsewhere on the planet are associated with canoes, boats, water and nets and of course fish catching. But due to low fish catches as a result of rising human population and fishing practices unfriendly to the environment in Lake Malawi, some fishermen in Nkhata Bay District, about 50 Km from Mzuzu (Malawi's major city in the northern region) are harvesting bees.

"ASk ANy SCHOOL CHILD “WHAT DO BEES DO?” and he or she will most likely answer “Bees make honey.” That is certainly true, but only for honey bees. Even more important than making honey is that bees pollinate plants. Only honey bees make honey. Now firmly established across the continent, the popular honey bee is not a native bee, but was brought to America by European settlers 400 years ago. Its full name is the European Honey Bee.

Sunday, 23 January 2011

"The EDM acknowledges the report by Buglife (2009) (1) which concludes that our regulatory system is inadequate for the assessment of this group of pesticides.

Indeed, there is significant and serious doubt that these pesticides are safe, yet I am aware of a number of erroneous arguments opposing this motion:

1. The Buglife report, 2009 has been examined by the Advisory Committee on Pesticides/DEFRA . Given the evidence, there is no need to change the system that regulates pesticides.

a. The Advisory Committee on Pesticides have examined the Buglife report (2).

This document appears to completely ignore very relevant (and difficult/impossible to refute) data contained within the Buglife report.

It actually fails to address the key points made and instead, focuses on scenarios primarily concerned with ‘mistakes’ made during application, or what they consider to be “unlikely” scenarios (without justifying how they came to these conclusions).

Additionally, they have not justified why or how they can consider the regulatory system to be acceptable, when it fails to require sensitive and specific data that: Read further at Buzz About

Wednesday, 12 January 2011

"None of this is on the label. Rarely will a jar of honey say “Made in China.” Instead, Chinese honey sold in North America is more likely to be stamped as Indonesian, Malaysian or Taiwanese, due to a growing multimillion dollar laundering system designed to keep the endless supply of cheap and often contaminated Chinese honey moving into the U.S., where tariffs have been implemented to staunch the flow and protect its own struggling industry.

"This is something which may skew judgement. One of the claims in the open letter sent to the association by independent beekeepers is that 'the BBKA appears never to have issued any public statement that is critical of any pesticides or pesticide manufacturer'. That's a sweeping statement, but it's certainly the case, if you leaf through BBKA News, that pesticides are not viewed as a major problem.

Thursday, 30 December 2010

A joint study between the military and scientists concluded that a virus-fungus combo could be what's sending bees to their graves. But as Fortune recently reported, this study might not be all it's cracked up to be. Montana bee researcher, Jerry Bromenshenk, served as lead author of the study pinpointing the virus-fungus duo. Bromenshenk serves as CEO of a company that produces sensors to detect bee diseases, and he also received a hefty grant from Bayer, a leading pesticide producer. Uh oh, Bromenshenk — the buzz is that your study could be biased.

Tuesday, 28 December 2010

LONDON – It came with wobbly writing and hand-drawn diagrams, but an elementary school science project has made it into a peer-reviewed journal from Britain's prestigious Royal Society.

Biology Letters published a report Wednesday conducted and written by a group of 8- to 10-year-olds from an English elementary school investigating the way bumblebees see colors and patterns. The scientific organization — which is more than three centuries old and includes some of the world's most eminent scientists — said the children reported findings that were a "genuine advance" in the field of insect color and pattern vision.

Wednesday, 22 December 2010

"A breakthrough in the battle against a deadly mite responsible for decimating the honeybee population has been welcomed by conservation groups.

The varroa mite is the biggest killer of honeybees and has become resistant to medication developed to destroy it. But now scientists have identified a genetic technique that could stop the mite in its tracks.

Researchers from the government's National Bee Unit and Aberdeen University have worked out how to 'silence' natural functions in the mites' genes.

Tuesday, 16 November 2010

A cheer must have gone up at Bayer on Thursday when a front-page New York Times article, under the headline "Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery," described how a newly released study pinpoints a different cause for the die-off: "a fungus tag-teaming with a virus." The study, written in collaboration with Army scientists at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center outside Baltimore, analyzed the proteins of afflicted bees using a new Army software system. The Bayer pesticides, however, go unmentioned.